A More Detailed And Rather Vigorous Exchange On The Film Body Heat

B:

Well, I was wrong about Body Heat. It's not porn, it's smut. And Kasdan did care about the plot. In fact the plot has so many twists and turns it's hard to follow. And harder to believe. Still, I was very impressed with Kasdan's eye and craftsmanship. Visually the movie is stunning. I loved the opening titles. And the music is perfect. It's the script that sucks.

The authenticity of the Florida setting is undermined by the phoniness of the inhabitants and the theatricality of the dialogue. Everyone in this one-horse town sounds like he or she is auditioning for the Algonquin Round Table; even a greasy-spoon waitress. Ted Danson is supposed to be a prosecutor but could as easily have been a wise cracking bar tender. There wasn't one moment when I was under the illusion that he and William Hurt were lawyers, or that the black actor was a cop. They were just 3 actors reciting their lines. And often so quickly (i.e. "realistically") that I couldn't figure out what they hell they were saying.

Not that it mattered. Virtually nothing they said, at least in first half hour, advanced the movie's storyline. It wasn't conversation, it was repartee. The only "one-liner" I found the least bit natural was delivered by Kim Zimmer, who played Marry Ann. "This sure is a friendly town," struck me as something Matty's friend might have actually come up with, under the circumstances. But Kasdan even blunts the effect of this "one-liner" by burying it in a forest of pedestrian verbiage."Hey lady, y'wanna fuck?" Racine says, to the back of the woman in the white dress.

She turns and says, provocatively, "Gee, I don't know (pause) maybe."

Racine laughs, uncomfortably and begins to mumble an apology.

Mary Ann keeps going. "This sure is a friendly town."

Racine continues to mumble and fumble.

"Y'mean, the offer's no good?" Mary Anne says, then notices Matty approaching the gazebo. "Maybe you should deliver it next door." Then, as Matty arrives, "Maybe you were looking for the lady of the house. I don't know..."

This is typical of all the dialogue in the movie, as well as the camera work and editing. In his untiring effort to out-noir his predecessors Kasdan engages in overkill. On the principle of "less is more" this is how, IMHO, this genuinely amusing scene should have played out:

Racine: "Hey lady, y'wanna fuck?"

Mary Anne turns and laughs: "This sure is a friendly town."

Racine, embarrassed, mumbles an apology.

Matty, having emerged from the house, approaches the gazebo.

Mary Anne: "Maybe you were looking for the lady of the house."

Racine turns to see Matty.

Matty: "I see you've met my friend, Mary Anne."

Of course even the long drawn-out version is refreshingly brief compared to what preceded it. The first 30 minutes of this movie was like watching paint dry. Instead of making his point, and moving on, Kasdun is like a dog with a bone. Yes, it's hot, Larry, we get it. Yes, Racine is horny, we get it. Yes, he and Matty are fucking like two dogs in heat, we get it. You don't have to shove it in our face. Over, and over, and over...

Ironically, when Kasdan finally get's down to actually telling his convoluted story it's like he's just trying to get it over with, as quickly as possible. He leaves out so many essential details it's hard to follow. Or believe. The plot of this "steamy" thriller has more holes than Swiss cheese. As you know, Racine's brilliant scheme is to murder Matty's husband and make it look like he died in a failed arson attempt. This involves recruiting a "client", played by Mickey Rourke (whom I found one of the few truly colorful and convincing characters) to build a time-delay device that will set the fire, after the victim has been killed, at another location, and the body transported, in the trunk of his car, to some shack, and dumped.

What could possibly go wrong?

The first part of the plan is for Racine to sneak into the victim's house, at 3 am., creep up the stairs to his bedroom, where, hopefully, he's lying asleep beside his wife, and hit him over the head with what looks like a wooden fence post.

What could possibly go wrong?

Having come up with this hare-brained scheme Racine has the good sense to nix Matty's idea to draw a new will, and forge her husband's signature. The grieving widow shouldn't do anything to draw the attention of the authorities to her wealthy husband's untimely death. "We're going to kill him," Racine says, as if she hasn't figured it out yet. "It's the only way we can have everything we want. A man is going to die. For no reason, but that we want him dead. He doesn't deserve it. Let's not ever say that. We're doing it for us. You'll get half of everything he owns. We're going to kill him. And I think I know how..."

Racine delivers this Shakespearian monologue at a rendezvous with his accomplice, but he's really talking to us, the moviegoing audience. In case we haven't been paying attention. True, Kasdan's hand isn't quite as heavy as Tarantino's but Body Heat doesn't exactly have "the Lubitsch touch". 

Contrary to her accomplice's warning Matty prepares the bogus will and Racine only finds out about it at a meeting called by her late husband's lawyer, to inform the beneficiaries that it's invalid because the bequest Matty inserted contravenes "the rule against perpetuities". Matty did it deliberately, because she wants to be the sole beneficiary. So this evil legal genius has to feign shock when her late husband's lawyer delivers the good/bad news. "Since the will is invalid, your husband died intestate".

There's only one problem; an earlier will. If the bogus will is invalid the first will is reinstated. Yet this big shot corporate lawyer, who ridiculed Racine's incompetence, not only ignores the earlier will (which he drew) but manages to liquidate all of his late client's investments and real estate holdings in matter of weeks. "The lawyer called," Matty informs Racine, before her husband's ashes have cooled off. "I'll be able to get the money. He apologized for the delay."

The delay? Seriously? We're expected to believe her late husband's lawyer is apologizing for not only acting against his late client's wishes but for winding up his estate quicker than most lawyers can probate a will? And we're expected to believe Matty's sister-in-law, who lost several million dollars, would just roll over and play dead? This plot twist is beyond implausible, it's absurd. In real life this estate would be tied up in court for years, if not decades.

But this isn't real life; it's a movie, right? Yes, but it isn't Star Wars. It doesn't take place in "a galaxy far away" but in Kasdan's home town, in the 20th Century. So it doesn't require the same "voluntary suspension of disbelief". The first 1/3 of Body Heat is so "cinema verite" you can practically smell the sweat. Unfortunately, as it dragged on, that's not all I could smell.

Look, in spite of my previous misgivings, I approached your favorite movie with an open mind. I wanted to like it. I'd have gladly overlooked a few implausibilities, if I'd found Racine and Matty the least bit engaging. But they made my flesh crawl. He's a creep and she's a slut. And there's a difference between implausible and impossible. For instance how did Matty survive the explosion of the shed where she claimed she'd stashed her husband's glasses? In order for the device to go off she had to open the door, right? 

Yet she not only came away unscathed but managed to get to her car, and drive off, without Racine seeing her. Since she'd told him that she'd parked her car right next to his didn't he notice that it was gone? And wonder why?

Or maybe that's what prompted his Eureka moment, a couple of months later, when he's lying in his jail cell. "She's alive," he cries, like young Dr. Frankenstein. The whole nefarious scheme had come to him, in a dream, as it were. The woman who had played him for a sucker wasn't really Matty Walker. 

The conniving bitch had pulled this scam before, so she had assumed another woman's identity in order to land another fish. Racine's theory is confirmed by a package that comes in the mail. A high school year book, in which another girl's picture is above the name "Matty (Whatever)". And a different name is below a picture of the girl whom Racine knew as "Matty". According to the yearbook, this homecoming queen's ambition was to become rich and move to a tropical Island. Cut to a tropical island, where Matty (or whatever her name is) is lounging in a beach chair, beside some Latin lover. She's wearing her late husband's glasses. (I guess they had the same prescription).

Coincidentally, last night, I watched The Glass Key, on TCM, and even though I had seen it at least twice before enjoyed it. Implausibilities and all. Allan Ladd survives a beating that would have killed any ordinary mortal, with nothing more serious than an abrasion on his ruggedly handsome face. Then, after a few days, he gets out of his hospital bed and walks back into the lion's den, unarmed. And I was willing to accept these bizarre plot devices even though I didn't believe them. 

Because Allan Ladd isn't an ordinary mortal, he's a movie icon. 5 foot 6 and larger than life. Ditto Veronica Lake. And William Bendix. And Brian Donleavy. I knew "the cavalry" (i.e. Donleavy) would arrive at the last minute to rescue his lifelong friend, not because I'd seen The Glass Key before, but because I'd seen countless other movies. And that's the formula. I was willing to "suspend my disbelief" because I was being entertained. I didn't find Body Heat entertaining. It was mildly interesting, visually impressive, but basically boring. I suspect the reason you can watch this pretentious "neo noir classic", over and over, is to see if you can figure out that fucking convoluted plot.

Me:

Ok, you’ve moved me to a granular response to your comments on Body Heat. 

First off, I’m not sure of any substantive difference between porn and smut in relation to explicit sex. They’re just two different words saying “it’s dirty.” I’ve already canvassed the role sex plays in this film to dismantle any suggestion of it being pornographic, that is, being merely for own its own and merely to titillate or arouse. So of course the same comments apply to the charge of smut. But insofar as smut has a more pernicious connotation, my comments apply more strongly and that characterization, smut, betrays an even bigger failure to understand the film. 

If sufficient attention is paid, or the movie is seen again, the plot falls nicely into place. Not the first movie that demands close watching or reviewing. And the plot’s intricacy, as you note, is the manifestation of Kasdan’s care and concern with it. I agree with your being impressed by the director’s eye and craftsmanship, with the movie’s visual brilliance and the music. By the way, the script is just fine. 

I don’t see where the setting is undermined by any phoniness of the characters or by how they speak with each other. The talk is just fine, maybe slightly dramatic or heightened but that effect blends beautifully with the literary quality of the film, an elevated depiction of human burning and the cool, calculated exploitation of it, as I’ve already explained. And exactly why can’t a greasy spoon waitress get off a good line? Racine comes off easily as an incompetent lawyer. So does Lowenstein as a prosecutor of a certain detached kind, a nice, odd duck kind of guy with sweet dance moves doing his job. 

The one trial scene over the slot machines or whatever works perfectly and we get a bird’s eye view of Racine’s legal mediocrity, which is of course pivotal to the plot. So the scene is good in quite a few ways: it’s funny; it socks us into the daily ways of the town; it’s realistic enough; and it sets up nicely that pivotal mediocrity. 

I can’t for the life of me see how you had any trouble seeing Oscar as a cop. He has a rumpled, sweaty, serious, sober sense of duty, which the film shows convincingly in tension with his friendship with Racine. And I have no trouble understanding what they say. Honestly, your complaint here seems from left field, idiosyncratic and out of whack with the movie. 

The notion that nothing “they said” in the first 1/4 of the film advances the movie’s story line is hard to understand. Who’s this “they”? By thirty minutes in, we’ve had the trial, which sets up, as noted, the pivotal aspect of Racine’s legal haplessness; Racine has had first encounter with Maddy; everything’s hot; and we’re well underway into the film’s arc. So, really, what are you talking about? 

As for the blunted one liner, I’m sorry but you’ve got it exactly backwards. And it seems by your comment, “a forest of pedestrian verbiage,” you’ve failed to understand the scene. When Racine approaches Mary Ann, he thinks it’s Maddy, who he has in fact been fucking and with whom he believes he’s on intensely intimate terms. And he thinks they’re alone. 

So it’s perfectly natural for him to say that to her. It’s the most natural and believable thing for him to say and it’s hardly a “forest of pedestrian verbiage.” It’s plain talk. And then comes the good one liner, but one that doesn’t stand out as exceptional in the script. Rather it fits right in with an absolutely fine script as a whole. Of course Racine lapses into apologetic mumbling out of sheer embarrassment and too because he’s aghast in thinking he’s blown his and Maddy’s secret, which it turns out right away he hasn’t, and which concern is a tremendous piece of irony considering how Maddy’s scheming and villainy work themselves out. So your poking ridicule at the mumbling is beside the point of what’s going on in the scene. 

The scene works perfectly. The dialogue and trialogue, ranging from mistaken intimate plain talk, to mumbling confusion, to sophisticated and flirtatious one liners, are on the money. With all due respect, the scene doesn’t need your rewrite. 

Back to the first thirty minutes, of course we see all the manifestations of heat and sex. Btw, we don’t see Racine and Maddy “fucking like dogs in heat.” We see them together a lot, and we see them in intimate poses a lot, more poses that suggest lovemaking and intimacy than actual explicit sex scenes, But as I first noted, refuting any charge of the pornographic, now apparently become smut, we’re seeing the deliberate reeling in of Racine, Maddy slowly but surely bringing him to the point of utter malleability to her wishes with such control that she has him believing it’s his idea and decision to kill Edmund. You gloss over this and don’t appreciate how skilfully Kasdan sets this up. It’s simply anything but boring. You keep saying, “we get it.” But I’m not sure you do, or at least not well enough. 

I don’t at all see Kasdan trying to get his story over with as quickly as possible. I don’t know what details are left out or what the holes are. The plan for the film’s purposes is the plan. It does go initially wrong because Kasdan intends it to as Edmund comes downstairs with a gun. But it gets executed in its initial phase however clumsily and however with a struggle. So, so far 0 has finally gone wrong. You point to missing details and and Swiss cheese holes. But you identify none of them, being content merely to repeat your rhetorical question, “What could possibly go wrong?” without answering it to reveal the movie’s shortcomings here. 

On your “Shakespearean monologue” paragraph, which is mostly plot summary, I’ll only note that what Racine says is the opposite of a Shakespearean monologue. What he says is short and to the point. 

Your problem is that you miss the point and the dramatic irony of the scene. The contrast is between Racine struggling to be honest with himself because unlike Maddy, he is, not-too-bright shnook that he is, no 100% no goodnik. He’s basically a good, hapless, guy who’s been seduced into, brought slowly but surely to, reeled into, evil by pure 100% evil. He’s trying to be clear and square with himself as to what he’s doing and he’s trying to have her see things the way he does.

Of course she’s miles ahead of him, sociopathic miles at that, and doesn’t need the benefit of looking at herself squarely and clearly. She understands herself perfectly and is empty of moral concern. The irony of this is reinforced by this being the scene, if I’m recalling things correctly, where the poor guy is under the delusion that killing Edmund is his idea and decision. So Racine is precisely not talking to the audience, which doesn’t need its head hit. Ironies abound here as I explain but which you seem not to have noted. 

With all due respect your complaint about the will and its settling is off the mark. It’s a film not a procedural. If some niceties are tripped over, no one really cares so long as what’s tripped over works in the movie, which it does. And by the way, I was no estates lawyer, though I got an A in Estates in law school, I think there’s a problem with your problem with the will. 

If a valid will fails due to violating the rule against perpetuities, then it’s not void ab initio I don’t think, the way one will be, say, if it’s a fraudulent will or one entered into by coercion or maybe executed without proper formality—not sure about that last one. In the case of an otherwise valid will falling by reason of a flawed provision, say offending the rule against perpetuities, then the previous will doesn’t operate and intestacy is at hand for that portion of the estate, or perhaps all of it, made inoperative by the violation. 

And a further btw, a friend of mine who went to the University of Chicago law school, one of the best in America, said his Estates prof showed sections of this film to illustrate the perpetuities rule. 

When you end your paragraph with what would happen in real life, you betray an error. This isn’t real life. It’s a film. The film operates on the premises of an intestacy, a rapid liquidation of assets and no legal contest. To complain about these plot premises because “it doesn’t work that way in real life” is to confuse art and life, your protestation to the contrary notwithstanding:

...But this isn't real life; it's a movie, right? Yes, but it isn't Star Wars. It doesn't take place in "a galaxy far away" but in Kasdan's home town, in the 20th Century. So it doesn't require the same "voluntary suspension of disbelief"...

Nobody I’ve ever spoken to or read, lawyers and non lawyers alike, about this film has had any trouble suspending disbelief for any part of it. 

I can’t see how you find the relationship, such as it is, between Racine and Maddy unengaging. But you’ve had a visceral response to them that to my mind, in George Costanza’s terms, means “it’s me, ie you, not you, ie the film.” You’re entirely reductive in dismissing Racine simply as a “creep.” He’s a good guy, hapless, weak, of fairly low character, but likeable. His friends like him and we, the audience, like him along with them. But he gets played big time and the movie turns on that, him getting played by a master player, which, as I note, makes his “Shakespearean monologue,” which actually isn’t one, touching, even poignant. 

Same reductiveness in dismissing Maddy as simply a slut—if she is that, and I’ll suggest to you she isn’t—it’s only a small part of her. It’s only a small part of the main thing about her, her pure evil to the point of sociopathy. Her acting, her relentlessness, her willingness, as the movie’s theme has it, “to do what’s necessary,” are what she’s about and the movie conveys it all brilliantly. I’d say she’s as good a femme fatale as I’ve seen in any film noir I’ve seen. 

It is a bit mysterious how she opened the shed without blowing herself up. I imagine she used a stick to or some such to prod the door open. It’s not a stretch to imagine that and it certainly doesn’t land the movie in implausibility. 

Why Maddy’s arguably not be a slut is that pronuncedly she’s not panting after anything in pants. She has culled out her victim and uses sex selectively and particularly in order to accomplish her ends. She’s sexually active in that but isdifferent from a woman who too easily goes with a lot of men.  

Is she at the end wearing her late husband’s glasses? My recollection of the great last scene is she’s sitting in the sun wearing a pair of sun glasses. But if she is, so what?

So anyway this is all me reacting to your objections to Body Heat. I find most of them wrong and missing the mark of this terrific film and about and how wonderfully well it works. 

An Exchange On Body Heat As Film Noir

B:

“Neo noir" doesn't do it for me. How about "ersatz noir"?

True, there's "not much dividing (Body Heat) from The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity in terms of plot or theme..." That's the problem. The movie doesn't reflect Lawrence Kasdan's artistic vision but an attempt to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. No, not walk, fly. He was determined to out-noir his predecessors. Like Quentin Tarantino's overrated parodies, Body Heat is all style and no substance. Screenwriter Kasdan was content to recycle the plot of Double Indemnity because plot was the least of his concerns. Body Heat is closer to soft-core porn than entertainment. Unlike the movies it attempts to emulate it's completely predictable. Even the title is a "spoiler".

The filmmakers who have been lumped under the "film noir" category weren't trying to shock or titillate, they were just trying to tell a story. Each in his own way. Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce are similar in "plot and theme" because they were based on the work of the same novelist, James M. Cain. I read all of the novels in question and the movies are relatively faithful adaptations.

Body Heat, on the other hand, is light on storyline and heavy on "atmosphere". It's so over-the-top that it shoots itself in the foot. There's a saying in the movie industry: "less is more". Lana Turner, standing in a greasy spoon diner, wearing that white turban and bathing suit, is more arousing than a stark naked Kathleen Turner, moaning under the bedsheets. When you show EVERYTHING you leave nothing to the audience's imagination. Which, apparently, is a lesson Quentin Tarantino didn't learn during his apprenticeship as a video rental clerk.

Maybe "ersatz noir" is too narrow a definition for these plotless wonders; how about "shock shlock"?

Me:

B, thanks for your thoughtful note, which I enjoyed reading: I guess one man’s neo is another man’s ersatz. 

Body Heat is a different movie for me than it is for you. 

We have common ground that it fits into the slot of a film noir but you think it’s duplicative rather than original. I disagree. The creation of atmosphere through the, what to call it?, the leitmotif of heat as evident in the persistent imagery of and references to burning, sweating, fanning, sexual desire, febrility and so on contrasts brilliantly with the cool, manipulative calculation of Maddy Walker, the cool, ironic self restraint of the Ted Danson character, the moments of humour at the expense of Ned Racine, especially his legal ineptness, the coolness of Teddy Lewis even as he’s an arsonist for hire. 

That contrast forms a central tension in the film and yields a sophisticated, almost literary kind of complex unity that the old noirs don’t have. That contrast is even evident in Ted Danson’s caring but cool detachment, including dance moves, and in the heated rumpledness of Oscar who sweats out trying to exonerate Racine but then must do his duty and arrest him. Unlike Oscar, Danson/Lowenstein (presumably Jewish) is cooly indifferent to the murder of a really bad guy like Edmund Walker.  

So I don’t agree the film is “all style and no substance.” What substance would you want? It’s a terrifically crafted story of manipulation through sex and brilliant wiles that brings a weak, flawed man low and finally to prison, while cunning evil succeeds in fulfilling all of its ambitions. And in all that we’re left with a bit of tantalizing ambiguity as to the extent, if any, of Maddy Walker’s feelings, if any, for Racine as she was conning him, seductively bending him to her will. Some substance: consider the theme in the film of will and wilfulness as relentlessness, as doing whatever is necessary.

In Body Heat both titillation and explicit sexuality are integral to the story. So I’m not offended or put off by them. The film, made in 1981, reflects a different cultural sensibility towards sex compared to the time of the old noir standards. This more modern sensibility is evident in the art that its culture produced. 

I see nothing pornographic or even approaching pornography in the film’s sexual scenes. They’re not there for their own sake or simply to arouse. They’re there to give us the concrete and real sense of how Maddy Walker lures Racine, step by calculated step, as the means to her ends. And in fact everything isn’t shown. Mostly, we see the shadows and outlines of everything. We never see Maddy Walker’s or Racine’s genitalia for example. We never see prolonged scenes of their lovemaking. The blow job she gives Racine as witnessed by Edmund Walker’s niece is never explicitly shown, only suggested at. 

For me, finally, a big difference between Tarantino generally and Kasdan in this particular film is that Tarantino typically winks at us and with us in subverting his own movies with violence so over the top that it’s surreal and thus rends the fabric of his movies. That takes a different turn in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. But that’s another story. There is none of that winking subversion in Body Heat. Kasdan wants us to suspend disbelief in watching it, enter and believe in its world, without him exploding that world with calculated outlandishness.

Continuing From Post Immediately Below On Religious Belief And Atheism

Friend:

Okay, we disagree. On point 1, you arrive at my point only in the fourth paragraph. In general, I'd say you take an overly literal approach to religion which ironically is not that different from the overly literal approach of fundamentalists, with just the truth signs reversed. On point 2, I'd say there's a big difference between understanding the benefits of something -- in this case, religion -- and actually obtaining those benefits, which, of course, is what I'm claiming we're in the process of losing. The odd thing is that I think we agree re: the empirical or literal truth claims of religion -- it just seems to me that you've become too fixated on that, and are missing the forest (so to speak). And finally, I'll admit that my notion of religion as a radical extension of an aesthetic approach to the world is speculative -- I'm feeling my way around -- but I think something like that represents the real core of religious truth underlying all the mythical narratives, and it's that core that actually delivers the benefits of religion. Dismissals like "magical thinking", however satisfying, miss that entirely.  

Me:

Just to say, on point 1, I can’t see the equivalence of seeing religion and the religious experience the way I do and the posture of religious fundamentalists. My view is open to persuasion if evidence presents itself. Theirs isn’t. They’re in a closed system of thought and belief that admits of nothing to the contrary unless their faith is tested. After all, my view isn’t based on faith. I tend to reject faith as a basis for understanding things. And faith is what they qua religion are all about. Now you may say, I’m not near your point because the, say, “empirical” truth of what they believe isn’t the thing; the thing is the goods that accrue from their belief. This view makes your point, at least for me, an elusive or slippery one, hard to get hold of. But even on the basis of it, I can’t see the equivalence: I’m willing to grant, and have said so, the existence of those goods but can’t in good faith come to embrace something with magical thinking at its starting point and without which the edifice, at least for believers, collapses or in principle ought to.

On your comment on point two I confess to running into the same brick wall I ultimately do with Jordan Peterson even as I agree enthusiastically with much of what he says along the way.

You say:

...but I think something like that represents the real core of religious truth underlying all the mythical narratives, and it's that core that actually delivers the benefits of religion...

I don’t know what “forest” I’m missing or more likely am lost in. I’m not really seeing the benefits divorced from from what as I see as superstition. If it’s the real core of religious belief that underlies all mythical narratives, then what is that exactly, some arbitrary fantasy about how the world came to be, how it will end, and what will happen to us after? You say we can’t live coherently, calmly and civilly without it? In the more distant past you said you were a big subscriber to negative capability in approaching what we don’t know about the nature of things. I then was too and still am. It strikes me that wanting to hold to some underlying truth of all narrative myth as a way of or to what exactly is a marked departure from negative capability. For it has us accepting what we find unfathomable and living with it, if not comfortably then at least acceptingly.

Still More On Religious Belief And Atheism

Friend:

"...  we atheists disclaim that kind of faith and that story and fiercely disclaim the truth of the big story of any religion"

I think that puts its finger on the problem, and indirectly points out the helpfulness of seeing religion as a kind of immersive aesthetic experience. Fiercely disclaiming the literal truth of any religion's "big story" seems to me akin to fiercely pointing out that War and Peace is historically inaccurate -- has a kind of tilting at windmills quality. And to say that you "save" such religious functions as being a communal glue, providing values to live by, is cosmological in ultimate significance, and providing a story about the world they take as at least metaphorically true, is to say that your "saving" everything about religion that makes its absence so significant, and maybe tragic. As I say, while I'm a great admirer of science, technology, reason, Enlightenment values, etc., I don't see that they can provide what religion once did, on the fumes of which I think we've been coasting for a while now. The great increase in material plenty means we can coast for quite a ways, but the signs of a slow cultural breakdown, despite the hopeless attempt to substitute politics for religion as a cultural capstone, have been with us since at least the Victorians, and nowhere can we see a modern culture that can so much as sustainably reproduce. That's why I'm interested in finding ways to understand a religious world that is entirely compatible with -- in fact, supports -- a rigorously this world, or immanent focus, and that's why it seems important to me to distinguish empirical beliefs from the sort of aestheticized beliefs that, on a smaller scale, you yourself say you experience in reading a story. But, as always, we'll see. Darwin's nature will have the last word, in any case, as usual. 

Me:

Two main points.

First, I argue that protesting the truth of religious narrative is *not* akin to protesting the historical inaccuracy of War And Peace.Religious narratives for believers assert a truth claim over the entire arc of an origin myth to the eschatological myth, which then in some religions is the gateway to a life everlasting in one form or other. 

There is no truth claim as to historical accuracy in War And Peace, which of course there would be if it presented itself as historical scholarship. No one with a scintilla of sophistication reading War And Peace Peace needs that kind of disabusing. People who believe literally in miracles don’t *need* disabusing but for atheists we’d think “it couldn’t hoit” and too “keep your belief in miracles out of schools” and too “stop bugging me about it or you’ll entice me into having a crack at some disabuse.” 

So I don’t see in an atheism that wants to cabin religious belief to the private realm of the believers, that wants people educated in the way of miracle-denying science, and wants to tilt back against proselytization is tilting at windmills. Not at all: it’s rather in one way of understanding it a righteous effort to keep a bright line between church and state.

Now, if to protest the truth of religious narratives is tilting at wind mills because the truth of the stories isn’t the thing, that the thing is, empirical truth or non truth notwithstanding, the communal experience rooted in a shared belief likened to entering the world of a book but more, plus one, I’d say that that attenuates what religion is, turns it into a mode of art plus one. And what that one is elusive. So what I see we’re left with on your approach is neither fish nor fowl and would be an insult to believers, who start from the truth claims, are not very much without them. It’s to cut the heart out of their belief and replace it with efficacies. 

Secondly, when you say that my “saving” those efficacies is in fact the basically the whole of the matter:

...And to say that you "save" such religious functions as being a communal glue, providing values to live by, is cosmological in ultimate significance, and providing a story about the world they take as at least metaphorically true, is to say that your "saving" everything about religion that makes its absence so significant, and maybe tragic...

you I think sort of make my argument. I don’t need to give religion the time of my day in the way of belief or immersing myself in its rituals to understand those benefits. But what I can’t do is formulate a rationale for wanting to privilege a truth claiming view of the world that is magical thinking, or more harshly, to cause and effect materialists, nonsense. 

I have no quarrel with assimilating the Bible to literature, one of its greatest works, and in understanding how our values, moral principles are informed by it in the way life and art inform each other and in the way, too, that that informing evolves. But you’re saying literature plus one, and it’s the plus one, as is clear, I have trouble with. 

More On Religion, Belief And Atheism

Friend:

I'm an atheist myself, in that I don't have a literal, or what I've been calling empirical, belief in a divine being. And I don't doubt many, probably most, religious adherents do, or at least say they do. The distinction between what they say and what they actually believe has to do with the "problems of belief" that I started with -- i.e., that it's not as simple as many atheists tend to think. But, like you, I haven't read the big-name atheists you mention, and I'm not arguing with them specifically. 

Problems of belief start with the old notion (Coleridge?) of the "willing suspension of disbelief" that we are supposed to adopt in reading fiction, for example. From my own experience, that's not quite an accurate description, in that I don't feel that literal belief or belief in the empirical reality of the fiction ever arises, and so can't be suspended -- but it points to the distinction between "belief" in empirical realities, like chairs or trees or actual people or actual events, and our apprehension of aesthetic reality in general. in which "belief" just seems like the wrong word, the product of a kind of category error. In any case, aesthetic experience is universally accepted and more or less understood -- religious experience, whatever it may be, not so much. My suggestion was simply that it might be viewed as a kind of radical extension of aesthetic experience, in which the frame that defines art is widened to include the viewer, and in such a way that the frame seems to disappear altogether. The nature of the world within that frame varies as we see in the varied religions, but it's functionality depends on its ability to bring and hold people into a community that mingles imaginative and quotidian elements. In that world, "belief" generally takes on different forms. The naive form is simply to believe without question whatever one is told, whether about an event one didn't witness oneself, or about tree spirits. More sophisticated would be to believe events told in myths, but to distinguish them for ordinary happenings around the corner. Another form is belief as a kind of testament or assertion of commitment, and this often takes the form of explicit "creeds" -- the fact that people make such avowals about their religious world but don't about their empirical world is obvious evidence that they themselves distinguish the kinds of belief each entails. And more evidence is in the agony many experience when or if they are assailed by doubts about such beliefs, which can feel like the end of a world. All of which simply points to the fact that the single word "belief" has different meanings in different contexts. 

But all that said, I like Pinker too, and I generally buy his tale of progress -- what I doubt is that "problem solving" and the scientific method, good as they are, can really substitute for the rich imaginative and communal worlds that religion once built, and of which we're still living in the ruins. 

Me:

I don’t think Pinker’s positing problem solving and the scientific method as communal glue. They’re the means of the vital job of preserving and improving the community materially. He lumps in humanism as one of his enlightenment values and it’s there that he locates values and principles that can match what religion has done in being sticky. 

Belief(s), its nature, its manifestations, has a lot of variety and can house a lot of distinctions and variables. But in broad terms as you note there’s a basic difference between belief that’s in the nature of faith and a stance that wants evidence for what we believe in the sense of what we take to be so. 

Where I have a problem with what you say and is your main point is the, if I can call it that, the aestheticization of religious belief experience, or a perspective of religion that is “aesthetics plus 1.” I don’t see the helpfulness of seeing it that way save for understanding as is commonly understood that religion is a communal glue that binds its adherents by a common faith, that evinces values to live by and is cosmological in ultimate significance in that it gives the believers a story about the world they take as true. Short of that, what is the efficacy of the “aesthetic plus one” perspective, particularly in guiding atheists’ comprehension of religious belief, especially since we atheists disclaim that kind of faith and that story and fiercely disclaim the truth of the big story of any religion?

As for suspending disbelief when we take in narrative art, I think the phrase is more of a helpful characterization than an analytically precise account. After all, if we’re moved to tears or laughter we do in some telling sense believe and take in the literal story. We do believe in it even as we know it’s not more than a story. There is—oxymoronic alert—a perhaps unconscious willing of imaginative belief. And when we use adjectives like “compelling” to note how we’re moved or our sense of the force of a character, that measures the depth of our suspension. That’s why I never find solace in art. If stuff is troubling me, then I can’t come to the work with a clear, calm mind. It’s only with a clear, calm mind that I can really enjoy what I’m reading or watching or listening to or looking at. 

And comparing the experience of art with the experience of religion, the same point I made about clinical madness and intense immersive experience, religious, drugged out or otherwise holds here, I think. Art ends when it’s finished and we’re back to the regular world, which too, we’ve never really left because, I also think, experiencing art is ongoingly dialectical between our sense of real world and our sense of the work. When the immersive religious experience ends, the religious are still religious, though in between these experiences less intensely so, and there is no full understanding that the experience is just a passing thing bounded by the real world. For the religious, the immersive experience is continuous with their deepest, self defining beliefs. 

On Sneering New Atheists

My Friend:

...My main point, I think, is just that religion involves its adherents in an entire imaginative and yes, communal, world, and isn't a simple collection of superstitions that is often all those outside such a world can see...

Me: 

I wonder how many thinking atheists, and I’m thinking especially of the new ones, see religious belief simply as a collection of superstitions and don’t see a communal world comprised by its adherents, adherents who don’t believe or think the world they’re devoted to is imaginative but think and believe it’s real. I’ve read more about the new atheists than I’ve actually read them though I have read some of Harris and Dawkins and have listened to and read bits of most of them from time to time, not so much lately, mind you. There is a sneering in them, especially Dawkins and Hitchens, at those enraptured by magical thinking, and the most for its proselytizers. But I don’t think they discount or glide over the communal glue religion provides. And Dawkins particularly in analogue to Reform Judaism prizes the that kind of ritual and ceremonial bonding but wants it grounded in something apart from a literal belief in divinity. Pinker too, who in my impression doesn’t sneer, he’s much too genial, makes a big point of that communal experience in enriching life while being steadfast in his non belief (and in his argument that things have been overall steadily improving given the replacement of religious thinking by problem solving rooted in enlightenment values maybe best encapsulated by the scientific method—rationality, deliberation, evidence, or as he puts it, “reason, science, humanism and progress.)

A Note In Answer To Two Young Kids Who Dared Me To Disprove God’s Existence

Being asked to prove that God doesn’t exist is an irrelevant question. That is so because there is no empirical or conceptual way to attend to the question. And the practical proof of the irrelevance is that there are an infinity of assertions that can’t be disproven because there is no empirical or conceptual way to test them. Prove that a cow didn’t create the universe. Or two cows. Or as many cows as you wish to number. Prove that a teacup isn’t the centre of the universe and everything that happens comes from its say so and will. And on and on. Asking to disprove a negative that can’t be tested empirically or conceptually beggars discourse. So the burden of proof is in the claimant. Prove that God exists. Failure to do so with legitimate evidence or arguments ends the matter: needing to disprove what can’t be proven is a philosophical absurdity. Saying that someone can’t disprove the existence of God is either of only the thinnest meaning—like saying elephants can’t fly—or simply makes no sense. 

A Short P.S. To My Immediately Below Note On The Meaning Of The Ending Of Once Upon A Time In...Hollywood

P.S.  I can’t believe Tarantino, as I see it, didn’t know what he was about, didn’t intend for us to see his ending shot through with foreboding and wanting to make a point about that in a general theme of fantasy interwoven with reality. He does change history in Inglorious Basterds. But there is something so outsized and universally iconic about Hitler that the fantasy is, as I would put it, “permissible,” that the iconicity of Hitler can accommodate our fantasizing his alternative fate. In contrast, the Tate murders were so local and specific, so intimately shocking, so, so to say, individual and personal that inverting their reality seems to me another order of alteration, one that doesn’t stand up to the reality, can’t accommodate it and isn’t meant to. Booth’s turning down the blow job, if it’s meant to intimate, in a sly, implied way, and underscore Polanski’s later statutory rape, seems to me consistent with the movie’s ending being more obviously, even explicitly, inseparable from our knowing the fact of the Tate murders. It may be, however, that different arguable inferences arise from that inseparability.